Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker

But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.

When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.

It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.

If Cora ever found a dream of her own, she would nurture it in soft soil, measure out each drop of water, each sunbeam, give it a chance to become.

Cora is screaming, a raw sound that begins somewhere deep inside her rib cage and tears its way up her throat and becomes a hurricane, a knife-sharp cry, the last sound that many women ever make.

But everything sloughs off Cora like dead skin because she is not the kind of person who creates things, who makes a mark on the world. She is an echo, quieter and quieter until she’s nothing at all.

A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.

Delilah always said Cora was the good kind of crazy, the kind that didn’t hurt anyone, that did good things but just too much of them.

Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.

If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.

She reminds herself that a living, breathing human could just as easily have given her the scar, that ghosts are not real just because Yifei Liu the kleptomaniac crime scene cleaner says so.

He has dark hair and amber eyes and looks more like a shadow that stands behind a person than a man himself, so tall and willowy in his black cassock. His eyes are the only bright spots on his body, like he himself is a pale marble cathedral, his eyes two golden stained glass windows.

I loooove this description

Cora Zeng does not get angry. Not because Auntie Lois says anger is a sin, or because Delilah could never be bothered with such an emotion, or because Cora is sage enough to understand that it is a pointless, destructive feeling. Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it’s a pool of anguish under her feet.

I am not going to let anyone take away what makes me a human. Because that’s what this guy is doing, Harvey. You blast people to bits or hack them apart because you don’t see them as human—you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either.

Even now, you want to walk away from us because it’s gross, because blood and guts make you uncomfortable. But it doesn’t matter if we’re uncomfortable—we don’t get to look away. We’re dying and no one can hear us.”

It’s that you’re asking me to believe in folktales when I don’t believe in anything at all, she thinks.

Her words taste jagged, and she knows she’s talking in the way her aunts don’t like, that her eyes are probably fever bright. This is why Cora is always quiet—when something actually matters, it matters too much, and everyone can taste it in her words. It scares them, how much it matters to her.

Delilah was never there when it was that bad. Emotions were a mess she couldn’t dirty her hands with. Instead, she was a lighthouse for Cora to look to in the distance, a reward at the end of it all. When you’re normal, you get your sister back.

I think being a hungry ghost isn’t that different for her, because I’m sure she was always hungry when she was alive.”

Cora knows it’s supposed to be a good thing, that Delilah isn’t suffering anymore. But now Cora is the only one left suffering, and somehow that doesn’t feel like a victory.

her mind for shame, for anything. There’s something peaceful about your worst fear coming true. Cora had hidden from the virus for the last half of a year, the fear of it chained to her at all times, the feeling of needing to cry but not being able to always lodged in her throat, choking her. Now that it’s here, Cora can live through it one minute at a time.

hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not.

She remembers Yifei feeding her dumplings, buying her food, texting her to make sure she was fine. They were never supposed to be her friends, but they didn’t give Cora a choice.

Harvey’s body is a slurry of soap and blood, and Yifei is a crushed soda can, but those are not the images that sear into Cora’s vision. The brightest, loudest memory is the two of them standing over Cora at Delilah’s altar with their hands on her shoulders, when the spice in the air stung her eyes and Harvey was holding his mouth open for dumplings and Cora still had hope. A killer tried to unmake them, but he failed. Harvey and Yifei are still here.

But slowly, Cora begins to realize that it doesn’t matter where she is. Cora isn’t safe in her own apartment. She’s not safe in a car. She’s not safe in public. Anywhere she goes, she could be killed and no one would care.

The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.

She knows that half the world sees Asian girls as pretty dolls, tiny trophies to parade around and fuck and then discard because you can’t love someone who isn’t a real person to you. She knows this, none of this is new, this is all just fingers running over scar tissue.

Everyone wants Asian girls to look pretty. No one wants them to talk.

Cora Zeng decides in that moment, with the whole block staring at her and headlights searing her vision and a hungry ghost looming behind her, that this is the kind of person she will be. The dirty street urchin who eats dogs and cats and bats raw, the communist spy who wants to kill Americans, the virgin in a schoolgirl skirt that will seduce him and ruin his life—all of his crooked fantasies can be true for all she cares. Because a bat eater is the kind of person that white men want to hurt, the kind of person who tangles their fear and hate together and elicits their rage, the kind of person who scares them. And Cora knows all too well that you can’t fear someone who has no power over you.

Besides, Cora didn’t think she could work with anyone but Harvey and Yifei.

She likes feeding Auntie Zeng’s fish, watching it wiggle toward the flakes and gobble them down. She likes sitting in the park in autumn and letting the dead leaves blow around her and thinking she can maybe hear Harvey’s voice. She likes when Auntie Zeng drives her to the beach and she sits on the sand and lets the cold water rush over her feet. None of those things are dreams, or even jobs. But they are pieces. Maybe Cora can use them to build something else, to start imagining what a dream might look like.